


Found in Translation

by eleventy



Category: Star Trek
Genre: M/M, and then everything changed when the romulans attacked, i promise they'll do the sex eventually, this was supposed to be a fluffy romance, why won't they sex?, with smut
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-04
Updated: 2016-04-10
Packaged: 2018-05-31 05:50:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6458431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eleventy/pseuds/eleventy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Survivors of the destruction of Vulcan start disappearing, and all signs point to the Romulans. The talents and brilliance of the Enterprise crew, Jim Kirk's own knack for improvisation, and his complicated rapport with Spock see them through a covert rescue mission whose code name should have been What Could Possibly Go Wrong?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I am a novice writer and I lack a beta. This is also a WIP. Caveat lector. However I do have the whole thing plotted out and with the scenes roughed in. So while it may be slow in coming, it will come. 
> 
> This is an ambiguously AU NuTrek setting. I despise a few elements of NuTrek, and oddly enough, one of them is how short their travel times are. So it takes more time to get from place to place in here than it does in the reboot. A bigger galaxy to play in. Another is that Kirk and Spock had their I Have Been And Always Shall Be moment far too soon in their relationship. So you can place this vaguely between movie one and movie two if it makes you feel better, or you can pretend that movie two didn't happen. Also, I have a Thing for nerdKirk and brainyKirk, which is a neglected bit of canon from both universes. My Kirk is a bit of a social sciences and humanities polymath, because I have seen STEMnerdKirk and tacticalgeniusKirk done brilliantly enough times that I wanted to branch out.
> 
> My deep thanks to Diane Duane, and Josepha Sherman and Susan Schwartz for their depictions of Vulcan and Romulan history and culture. I hope that the twists and tangents I've made do honor to the source material. If you have not yet read their Trek novels, fellow fen, you are in for a HUGE treat.

In Spock's quarters there were two tall standing stones of black basalt. Stelae, to be exact, Jim knew, because he had paid attention during his archaeology elective. They were inscribed in Old Vulcan, which he determined because it was definitely Vulcan but he couldn't read them. Damned if he could work out what Spock's stelae said, although he'd aced his translation exam and could ask "Which way to the facilities, please" with what even Uhura granted was a passable accent. 

The easy solution would be to ask his first officer what was written on the big rocks in his quarters, but Jim was still fairly shocked that he was allowed into those quarters on the farthest thing from official business, which was chess on Tuesday nights and *shir'apen* on Saturdays. Vulcans were private and intrusions on that privacy were typically met with the sort of flat civility that made you wish you'd never ventured out of the ape habitat to begin with. Jim didn't think he could take that from Spock. His first officer was his chess buddy; he was his first officer's *shir'apen*... counterpart. And they could build something from that. Build what, he didn't know, but he wasn't going to fuck it up with some clueless gaffe.

Not when he could just go ahead and learn Old Vulcan himself. It would be a simple matter of - 

Actually it was not. From what Jim could learn off the Nets, which was surprisingly little, Old High Vulcan bore very little resemblance to Modern Vulcan at all. In fact it more closely resembled Romulan, because at least those guys hadn't deliberately mutated their lingo to make a clean break with the past. Old High Vulcan was practically taboo. There was ancient literature, and certain ceremonies (strictly proscribed to outworlders) were conducted in it, and that was it. 

Which made it all the more strange that Spock had two shiny black rocks with deep-etched zigzags and curlicues spilling down, relics of the distant past of a planet that was now only a faint gravitational anomaly in the 40 Eridani A system. How had he obtained them? What was their significance? Were they only a piece of his homeworld, or something more intimately tied to him?

Uhura pointed out that his curiosity exceeded what was probably normal or proper, and Jim told her to eat the very nice cake he'd programmed for her and continue explaining how he could use statistical frequency of the glottal stop phoneme in the modern Vulcan and Romulan dialects to untangle the squiggles on Spock's rocks. 

***

"Very good, Captain," Spock said in a tone considerably warmer than the absolute zero temperatures he deployed on the bridge. Jim had managed to last twenty-two moves in *shir'apen* - a personal best. 

"Before you know it, I'm going to have your ass," he gloated.

"My commanding officer has no legitimate claim upon any part of my person," Spock said with quelling dignity.

"What I meant was I'm going to win."

"You are now sufficiently adept that you have a reasonable chance of defeating a Vulcan child of six years." 

"I have a new idea, Mr. Spock. It's called Monopoly. I've got the box in my quarters."

"I must decline, sir. My mother introduced me to that game, and it is not to my tastes." 

"Ohhh," crowed Jim delightedly. "You mean you lose." 

"It is a game in which logic and strategy have limited application." 

"Limited application of strategy, my ass. Then explain how I've won every game I've played since I was eight!" Jim didn't know where he was going with this, but he was having fun.

"I posit that it is because you cheat, Captain. And I cannot fathom your fascination with posteriors this evening. I can only hypothesize that it is something Doctor McCoy would find interesting in your upcoming psyc eval."

Did Spock just make a Freud joke? Jim was pretty sure Spock wouldn't have been able to come up with comebacks like this only a few months ago. He felt a little glow of pride. This was what it was all about, camaraderie between a commanding officer and his first. 

Jim lost three more games of shir'apen and went back to his quarters, quite satisfied with their progress. 

***  
Three days later, Jim sat in the officer's mess with a mug of overly lightened coffee. A stylus dangled between lax fingers over an already marked up hard copy of the glyphs. Very slowly he tightened his grip on the stylus, moved it over the sheet as if dowsing, and finally circled two identical sets of glyphs. A nominative case prefix, definitely! And what was obviously an honorific, and those were names, and there was clearly a shortage of verbs - this was an epithet poem! Spock's Rocks were poetry plinths! He downed the rest of the godawful coffee, packed up his things, and strode out of the officer's mess in a fantastic mood.

The syllables of ancient Vulcan rattled through his head all day as he poked and scribbled his way through all the paperwork from the last landing party, dropped in on Astrometrics and Botany, submitted to another one of Bones's allergy inoculations (this time with pollen, dander, and spores from two planets in the Alpha Tauron system,) and babysat some fresh ensigns through a four hour cycle on the bridge. One word occurred several times and in different forms, and it was familiar: *ashaya*. He knew he’d heard it before, or something like it. Maybe a rare example of a survival in Modern Vulcan? 

As soon as he was back in his quarters, ostensibly to change into something more suitable for sparring, he had to find out. "Computer. Translation, pre-Reform Vulcan. *Ashaya*." The computer buzzed its annoyance at coming up with nothing. Ok then. "Computer, search Vulcan news, scholarly, and literary output for the last 10 years. Keyword *ashaya*, and grammatical variations." The computer bleeped happily at having something to give him, and Jim sat down to look at the results... which were not much after all. All of them were marked with the glyph for Silences. Not accessible without authentication, probably a biometric scan. Vulcans took their Silences seriously. But that in itself was useful information. If *ashaya* was never used except in the context of the Silences, there were only a few domains it could belong to - health and mental health, religion, family matters, or criminal justice. Somehow Jim couldn't imagine even ancient Vulcans composing poetry on the topic of medical or legal matters, so that left either the language of theology or the language of intimacy. 

*Ashaya*, an honorific epithet by the construction of it, was either a religious figure or a loved one. Did Spock sleep beneath words of devotion to the ancestral deities of his people? Or beneath a love poem from a great grandmother a hundred times removed to an equally distant great grandfather? 

***  
Uhura slid in next to him at lunch the next day, her tray loaded up with a salad the size of her head and a brownie sundae nearly as large. She didn't do anything in half-measures. "How's the linguistics course going?"

"Good," Jim mumbled through his chicken salad, actually quite passable now that he'd fed the replicator detailed instructions on how to whip up a proper aioli. 

"Good? Last time you couldn't shut up about it, and now you give me an update consisting of one syllable?"

"It's poetry," Jim supplemented, not exactly sure why he didn't want to share his speculations. "It's an epithet poem." 

"Oh, that is interesting," Uhura said, and launched into a dissertation on the commonalities in Romulan and Vulcan nicknaming conventions that illuminated the lost literary corpus from which both derived. Jim was off the hook. And fascinated, although he didn't allow himself to get distracted from the first actually delicious curried chicken salad sandwich he'd had on this whole mission. 

She was a genius. His whole senior staff was geniuses, or close to it, and Jim felt every minute of his wasted youth whenever he gave them a chance to show off their education and experience. The thought of being in command of a crew this shiny - just blew him away. 

"You're grinning like a fool," Uhura told him, now halfway through her brownie and dispatching it with a tidy efficiency that was kind of terrifying. 

"You're cute when you geek out," he told her. 

"Spock said the same thing," she sighed.

"He did?" Jim said incredulously. 

"Well, in his own way he did. He said that it was gratifying to witness the operations of my intellect." 

"Wow," Jim said. 

"Yeah."

Well, this was awkward.

"I guess I just didn't want to be admired solely for my intellect, you know?"

"Right. You should be admired for all your outstanding attributes," Jim said, trying very hard to direct his gaze away from her attributes without appearing to actually try at all.

"Thank you, Captain. That was very tactful." 

"Really?" Jim said hopefully.

“So! I think I can get the Universal Translator to pick up new languages about thirty percent faster if you will just sign off on a little experiment that Chekhov and I have been working on…”

***

That night, Jim stopped by Chekhov’s quarters to let him know about the go ahead for his and Uhura’s Universal Translator experiment, and also borrowed Chekov’s treasured antique Go board and stones. He backed out the door repeating fervent promises that they would be returned the next day intact. Back in his own quarters, he replicated a big caraffe of peppery chai and a little pitcher of honeyed cream, and after some intense deliberations with the computer’s fire control and life support module, lit a real candle. He proceeded to construct a playlist with the kind of calculation and strategy that honestly, he wished he could summon up the attention span to devote to chess or *shir’apen*. Some retro-classical Spanish guitar made him feel calm and cozy and he didn’t give a crap what erudite insults Spock might come up with about Earth music.

But for once, Spock did not have any comments about Jim’s taste in music, and he sat down to learn Go with his earthenware mug of chai nestled in his long-fingered hands, almost as if he were having a good time. Predictably, he was a natural. But that was good, because the problem with chess was that it was too predictable even with Jim’s chaotic playing style and the 3-d board, and the problem with *shir’apen* was that Jim couldn’t even begin to compete. But here, they were on an even footing, Jim with his years of practice, and Spock with his prodigious calculation abilities. 

The playlist did just as Jim meant it to do, seguing gracefully from Spanish guitar to other plucked stringed instruments, ranging out across Earth’s cultures and time periods before crossing into the glassy Andorian harp and a Klingon thing that sounded like a banjo crossed with a lovesick cat, but in a good way, and finally launching into a Vulcan tone poem performed on a *ka’athyra*. Spock looked up from the board. “Did you select these compositions yourself?”

“What, you didn’t expect my tastes to be this cosmopolitan?” he said, a little smugly.

“No.”

“Shows what you know. You shouldn’t underestimate Humans.” 

“Do not be obtuse, Jim. No insult directed toward Human aesthetic sensibilities was intended. Your species’s hearing range does not extend either high or low enough to appreciate Vulcan music. Most of it sounds like mere noise to you.” 

“Oh?” He turned his head and pointed at the tiny, flesh-colored bud nestled in his ear, and the tiny filaments puncturing the skin underneath to meet up with his nervous system. “I beg to differ.” 

“You have augmented your hearing for the specific purpose of appreciating the music of other species?” Spock asked wonderingly, leaning in close enough that Jim wondered if he was going to sniff the hearing aid.

“Not quite. I lost most of my hearing in an accident when I was 14, and in my second year at the Academy I opted to upgrade my implants. And let me tell you, it took a while to appreciate the aesthetic merits of bat squeaks, even with the augmented hearing range. But I’ve developed quite a fondness for T’Apet’s work.”

“Yes, she truly was remarkable. As a student, I attended a performance of hers in a cavern outside Shi’Kahr. The acoustics of the site were remarkable, but her playing and singing would have been praiseworthy without any such assistance.” 

Hook, line, and sinker! “The Shalkith Cycle? I have that one! Computer, queue up Shalkith oh-six.” The tone poem finished and faded as the resonant hum of the next song’s first chords rose up, almost conjuring the smell of baked stone and the heat it radiated against the encroaching chill of a desert night. A voice rose above the strings, contralto, nasal, and wavering in a tightly controlled oscillation of pitch. 

Jim looked down and noticed that Spock had made his move on the board. He responded haphazardly by expanding one of his groups. His other game was afoot and proceeding exactly as planned. Better than planned. Spock’s eyes were hooded and his posture was more relaxed than Jim had ever seen it.

The vocalist was singing in modern Vulcan, but an old, Uhura might say unfinished, dialect. The Shalkith Cycle dated back to just after the time of Surak. T'Apet - Shalkith - sang in duet with a man, in what amounted to a debate over whether they should part forever and devote themselves to the discipline of Gol. It didn’t seem right to say that T'Apet infused the subject matter with passion, but she did manage to convey incredible nuances of uncertainty, conviction, and commitment above and beyond the technical brilliance and beauty of her performance. 

That, however, was not Jim’s focus. Her voice stilled and her counterpart's baritone glided up on a trembling dissonant note, sharpening with urgency. 

“Spock. I’ve listened to this song dozens of times, and I can’t figure out what he's saying right now.” 

Spock murmured, “‘Shall I leave thee unshaded, o my shelter/Shall I let thee go unwatered, who has wet my lips from the spring under the rock.’” 

Jim stoically watched a rather large group of his pieces get captured, while, deep inside, he was doing a very captainly victory dance. *Ashayam* - my shelter. An endearment. At the moment, even that hardwon piece of information seemed secondary to figuring out how he could contrive to get Spock to recite poetry more often.


	2. Chapter 2

The red alert woke him out of a sound sleep. He was the captain and he hadn't scheduled a drill at this godawful hour, so that had to mean it wasn’t a drill. Jim pulled on his uniform even as he rolled out of bed, and exited his quarters on one leg as he hauled the second boot on. He was not the only one rubbing his face and finger combing his hair as the crew flat-out ran to their battle stations in untidy lanes through the corridors. Despite the hustle, there was a minimum of commotion. Everyone was performing admirably, as Spock would say. A beam of fierce joy beat back the anxiety in his gut, and at that moment he felt that the ship was of one mind, and that they must all share this feeling.

By the time he was on the bridge, curt messages densely packed with information were flying back and forth; Alpha bridge officers were taking over from the relief crew. On the viewscreen, one of those enormous Tellarite people-movers spun slowly end over end, looking all too much like a tin can used for shotgun practice. A light-seconds away, something fast and heavily armed by the look of it hung in space with gunports open. 

“No survivors on the passenger vessel,” Spock reported. His fingers were everywhere on the science station console, eyes tracking multiple readouts at once. Of all of them, he was impeccably groomed and serenely grounded, as if they were merely charting interstellar phenomena. 

“Hostile vessel is not responding to hails. Repeating on multiple frequencies,” Uhura added. She too had a steady voice and sure hands, even with pillow marks on her face.

“Identity or affiliation of the hostile?” Jim asked.

“Ship does not match any known configuration and has a null profile on the AIS.”

“Pirate,” Jim said darkly. “Or merc.” If it wasn’t broadcasting on the Automatic Identification System, it was either a complete stranger in this part of the galaxy, or a criminal. Judging by the fact that it had just blown up over a thousand sentient beings, Jim was betting on the second.

“What is it waiting for?” Chekhov asked, unafraid to voice the dumb-sounding question. Good kid. Every team should have a Chekhov. The question wasn’t dumb to anyone who caught onto the direction he was going in.

“Its systems appear to be fully operational. It has sustained no damage. The Tellarite ship was unarmed.” Spock responded without really answering

“It can’t outshoot us, but it can outrun us, so why isn’t it?” Uhura asked.

“It can outrun us for a few minutes, but we can outrun it if the chase lasts any longer than that. Which it would,” Jim answered. He gripped the arms of his chair, inhaled sharply through his nose. “Right! Three possibilities. One: They are going to try to fight their way out and are just waiting for the right moment. Two: Their self-destructive urge is more pro-active than that, and they have already committed suicide, or are about to. Three: They are about to surrender.” 

“Four,” Chekhov said. “They know something that we do not.”

“Five,” Sulu put in. “They are in the process of mutiny.”

“Good,” Jim said, actually meaning, *I don’t like any of those options.* “Fire to disable weapons and propulsion,” he ordered, knowing that Sulu could do it without having to know the exact specs of the enemy ship.

It was not a textbook command structure. Jim had learned from the best how to make the hard decisions, make the right decisions, and issue them as orders that his crew would trust and obey. And then he’d found himself in the captain’s chair years early and in the middle of a crisis that overwrote all his previous definitions of “disaster” and “tragedy.” The Jim Kirk who had come out of that had acquired a deep-seated faith in the alchemy of a diverse and talented group of minds who shared a goal. And a rather shiny medal. But the alchemy part suited him better. 

The little corvette put up a fight but not much of one. Sulu fired the phasers in short bursts like a cook carving up a chicken at the joints. “Try hailing them again,” Jim told Uhura once it was dead in space. 

“Still no response.” 

“Status of their shields?”

“Inoperative,” said Spock. 

“Life signs?”

“Twenty-five. Mixed humanoid and… Vulcanoid.” Jim couldn’t tell if that was puzzlement or concern in Spock’s voice, but he shared both. Romulan pirates with a mixed crew? That made no sense - Romulans were bone-deep xenophobic. Pirates with Romulan prisoners? Or could they actually be Vulcans? Or some other Vulcanoid species - maybe the Romulans hadn’t been the only offshoots of the ancient diaspora? Something was up.

“Bridge to Sickbay.”

“McCoy here. No casualties to report.”

“Good, and we’re keeping it that way, but that’s not why I’m calling. Give Ordnance the formula for a medium-duration knockout drug that’s effective on Vulcanoids and Humanoids and can be aerosolized.”

“Gas grenades?”

“Gas grenades on the double.” Jim could hear the unspoken other question - an incredulous Vulcanoids?! That could wait.

“Bridge to Transporter Room one.” 

“Here.” 

“Crew from Ordnance is bringing you some packages. You’ll be transporting them to the coordinates Sulu is sending you.” 

“Received, and aye.” They waited a minute with the channel open, then Jim could hear the feet pounding into the transporter room. “Six packages received sir.”

“Spock, watch those lifesigns,” Jim ordered once Ordnance and the Transporter crew reported arming and beaming over the knockout gas grenades. “Sulu, you’re with me. Bridge to Sickbay - Bones, I need you in Transporter Room Three with your full kit. Security, I need a tactical team in breathers plus three extra phasers and breathers, and twenty-five transporter beacons.” 

Jim nodded and braced himself for the ride as Sulu deactivated the turbolift’s comfort mode and sent it zooming through the tube at a speed guaranteed to leave your stomach behind. They pounded into the transporter room. Jim grabbed the phaser and breather the security chief handed him as he took his position on the platform. The skin visible around McCoy’s facemask was looking pale and maybe a little clammy in anticipation of transporting, or possibly because he was being made to carry a phaser. Ensigns Alazar, Shlan, and Morita wore conveniently name-tagged heads-up displays in addition to their facemasks, and carried rifles. “Heavy stun, everyone,” Jim ordered, his voice muffled by his own breather. “Beam us over to their bridge.” 

***

“The keragen’s cleared out. Air’s safe to breathe,” McCoy reported, and Jim retracted his breather, allowing the membranes to fold back up. The tactical team didn’t bother, instead sweeping the room with their phaser rifles, despite the fact that the two bridge crew - humanoid - were slumped over in their seats. 

Sulu strode over and stunned each one. “That’s not necessary. They’ll be unconscious for another hour,” McCoy grumbled as Sulu attached transporter beacons to them.

“Overruled, Bones,” Jim said. “The last thing we want is some hardy soul waking up and causing trouble before we have them secured in our brig. Let’s move deck to deck. Stay together.”

They found two more crewmembers in the cramped and filthy Engineering compartment, but it was a small ship with a small crew. That left nineteen more life signs to account for and only one deck to go: a cargo hold. Jim had a bad feeling about this, and from the looks on his team’s faces, so did they. 

The lift’s doors opened and they had to step over the unconscious body of a burly woman dressed to intimidate and armed to the teeth. Jim spotted a Klingon disruptor and an Andorian saber in the mix. A few feet away sprawled a similarly decked out older man. In the same visual sweep of the room, he took in the rest of the life signs accounted for on the ship. Vulcanoid yes, but judging by the clothes and hairstyles, not Romulan, but actually Vulcan. They were dressed in civilian clothing, their necks collared and the collars chained to one another. Their hands were shackled. Two of them looked like teenagers. All of them showed bruises and scrapes, and some were wounded. 

Seeing the emerald blood smeared across a face that, in the poor light, could have been Spock’s, Jim felt like he needed to sit down for a moment, but he gritted his teeth and focused on what McCoy was saying. He was reading off from his med scanner in one hand and flipping open his field med kit with the other. “Certified one hundred percent genuine Vulcan,” he confirmed. “They’re in rough shape, Captain. If it weren’t for Vulcan resilience, some of them would be dead.” Jim could spot disruptor burns, bruises and contusions, punctures and lacerations. 

Meanwhile Sulu stunned and tagged the guards and Jim flipped open his communicator to contact the Enterprise. “Kirk to transporter room.”

“Scott here.” 

“We have six unconscious hostiles to beam up. Lock onto the transponders. Have a security team and stretchers in there and take them to the brig.”

After a moment, the unconscious guards shimmered and faded out, leaving only the characteristic beam-out odor - faintly sweet ionized air. 

Sulu must have grabbed the disruptor off the woman guard and was now using it to delicately slice through the chains that were tangling up and choking the unconscious Vulcans. McCoy was muttering to himself as he took readings and administered hyposprays here and there. Jim joined them, moving in to support the limp hands of a man whose palms were deeply slashed and bleeding heavily. McCoy let out an intermittently intelligible stream of profanity under his breath as he sprayed the wounds with clotting foam. When he was finally done, he looked at Jim.

“Are they ready to be moved?”

“The sooner I can get them to my sickbay, the better.” 

“Good. Kirk to Transporter Room. Use one of the cargo transporter platforms. Lock on to the away team and all the transport beacons. And send all the trauma teams Sickbay can muster.”

***

They rematerialized to the sound of many feet clattering urgently toward them on the acoustically unforgiving deck of the cavernous cargo bay. Jim found himself gently excluded from the hypercompetent medical hubbub. The adrenaline was receding and left him feeling cold, but no one got very far in Starfleet without having or developing a high tolerance for the ups and downs of the sympathetic nervous system. 

He summoned his officers to the briefing room and headed there with Sulu at his side looking angry and terribly, terribly awake. 

Spock and Chekhov were already seated at the conference table, foregrounding the viewport in which the wreck of the huge Tellarite craft still lazily tumbled. The back and forth of technical jargon between the two scientists and the flickering progression of numbers and diagrams on the conference room’s main display told Jim that their investigation was already well underway. Uhura arrived next, walking in briskly without looking up from her tablet, which she was muttering to. Scott bounded in as if it weren’t the middle of ship’s night and a crisis, and McCoy would get there once his patients were taken care of. 

All Jim had to do was put his palms on the table, and they quieted and turned to face him. He made eye contact with Spock with a little nod. 

“The craft that was destroyed in the attack was the Greehng’g, with a crew complement of forty-four Tellarite citizens and 1246 passengers of various species including mainly Tellarites, Humans, Andorians, Caitians, and the 19 Vulcans . Their flight plan shows that they had been making the Terra-Vulc… the Terra-40 Eridani A-Andor loop, picking up additional passengers before making best speed to a cluster of colony worlds in this sector, New Vulcan among them.”

“And the hostile?”

“A Flynn class corvette built for the civilian market between 2220 and 2245. This particular craft can be traced to the Titan shipyards in 2242.”

Uhura spoke up. “Despite its invalid registry information and the absence of markings, modifications to the weapons systems allowed us to track the ship to a repair and reclamation facility on on Alpha Centauri IV. We got a serial number and traced ownership as far as an ‘independent’ Orion merchant escort company.” 

Jim was nodding. “Which means no further records, at least not ones we can trust. But maybe we can work on the problem from another angle. We need to identify the crew.”

Sulu jumped in. “One of the men on the bridge and the male guard both had prison tattoos. We should be able to trace those organized crime clans.”

“I beat you to it,” McCoy said as he walked in. “The engineer has a replacement knee. I guess they didn’t think to file off that serial number. We’ll have her name by morning.”

“How are your patients who aren’t in the brig?” Jim asked.

“They’ll all make it. Sixteen of them are awake and starting to get settled right now, and they just had bumps and burns and little cuts. The other three, well. There’s the woman with the crushed trachea, which Dr. M’benga is repairing right now. Another one got a knife to the chest, but he’ll be fine. We just had to reinflate his lung and patch him up. Then there’s the man with the sliced up hands. I’ve got his hands in a stasis field until I can figure out how to patch up the parasensory nerves. He woke up and then dropped right off into what I assume is a healing trance.”

“Have any of them identified themselves?” Spock asked.

“Yes. T’Shal says she and the rest of them are of House Votik and they were relocating from the old P’jem outpost to New Vulcan.”

“I must speak with them.” Spock was halfway to the door.

“Sit down, Spock.” Spock sat. “Tell me about Votik and P’jem. Is there any reason they would be targeted?” 

“P’jem was one of the first worlds Vulcan colonized, but of late it has been sparsely populated because it is located in a region that Andor has lay claim to since they achieved interstellar travel nine hundred years ago. The population consisted mainly of a few hundred monks who came and went, and the descendents of the four Houses who founded the colony three thousand years ago. After the destruction of our motherworld, the decision was made that the entire colony would be transferred to New Vulcan.”

“And Votik?”

“Votik is the fourth of the aforementioned four founding houses of P’jem. They are ultra-traditionalists, separatists, and xenophobes,” Spock said tightly.

“Nice,” drawled McCoy. 

“Can it, Bones. What about anything that would make them targets for pirate kidnappers?” 

“Nothing. The separatists stay out of politics, do not own any significant wealth, and maintain such a low profile that it seems unlikely that non-Vulcans would know of their existence.” 

Uhura looked about to speak up, but Sulu beat her to it. “They’re not targets because they’re Vulcan separatists. They’re targets because they’re Vulcans. It’s the Romulans, sir.” 

“Nero is dead, and the Romulan Empire has disavowed him,” Spock said. 

“Disavowed him officially,” Sulu insisted. 

“Who else would have a grudge against Vulcans?” Uhura asked.

“Andor?” Chekhov put in.

“That’s ancient history. Andor gave up its imperial ambitions so Tellar would stop eradicating their colonies, and they could both join the Federation,” dismissed Kirk.

“Klingons?” submitted Uhura. “They can’t have missed how the destruction of Vulcan destabilized the Federation. But no, sneaky plots and collateral damage aren't the Empire's style. If they wanted to start a war, they'd do it with an open attack on a Starfleet vessel or base.”

“There’s no point in speculating when the answers are inside our prisoners’ skulls,” Jim said. “I’ll request Starfleet to dispatch a psychoforensics team and have them waiting for us at New Vulcan. After we finish a full scan of the vicinity, we’ll proceed there at maximum warp.” There were nods around the table. 

The briefing wound down and Jim spent a few minutes discussing shift reallocations with the night duty yeoman so they could all salvage a few hours of sleep. 

Despite yawning all the way back to his quarters, he felt wide awake as soon as he lay down. In the thick gray dimness, he could see the two chai mugs still silhouetted on his table. “Computer, resume music,” he ordered, and one of Soval’s tone poems began to play. Its soothing patterns did nothing to alleviate his wakefulness. His mind went to the seemingly endless quantities of wrong-colored blood spreading across deckplates more profusely in his imagination than it had in life. Limbs sprawled, dark hair in disarray, eyes lidded, mouth parted in unconsciousness with viridian bruises blooming across an elegant cheekbone. Jim sat up, sucking air that was cold against his clammy skin. Guess he’d fallen asleep after all. 

He padded over to the wall com and then stopped with his hand halfway to the button. No, what were the chances he was still awake? Instead, he pulled out his chair at the table and rested his chin on his fist as he contemplated the unfinished game. A few postural adjustments later, it was obvious he was not going to become sleepy again by means of dim lights and boredom. Damned if he was going to take a hypo for it when there was a natural remedy at hand, so to speak. 

The chair not being very conducive to such activities - almost as if Starfleet’s specs for sitting apparatus were specifically designed to preclude the possibility of a relaxing moment of self-gratification - he peeled the sheets down and shucked off the shirt and shorts.


End file.
